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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this will have positive long-term outcomes, if it results in more people taking climate change seriously and it leads to investing in alternative forms of energy generation?

Spending a few days suffering in the sweltering heat really makes you appreciate the magic of the AC and reliable access to power.

The biggest concern is whether people will end up dying because of this. I know there's places in the US where the heat is legitimately lethal.

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I froze in my 35 degree apartment for about 5 days a couple of years ago when the TX powergrid went out due to the unwinterized power grid. The state essentially did nothing, and the GOP politicians will easily get reelected who oversaw that disaster. The voting base isn't rational and these things won't move the needle.

Legitimately lethal heat doesn't even have to be in typically hot places or require a power outage to be lethal. In fact, the 2021 heatwave in Pacific Northwest[1] (which is known to have a moderate climate), was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_hea...

According to the article, this expectation is actually caused by "green" energy implementations and the shift to climate friendly infra. Mankind should be free to consume as much energy as it wants, but we need to focus on making that energy carbon neutral (or negative).

A quick google suggests that 173,000 terawatts of solar energy hits the earth continuously. If my googling and maths are correct, we're using 22k TWhr total meaning more energy hits the earth in 1 hour than we use annually.

Edit: plz do correct me on these maths if I'm off, i'm by no means an expert.

But that number means nothing because it's not even close to the magnitude of energy we can begin to capture.

Yes, and the point is that we don't need to be constraining our consumption as there's essentially no lack of energy. We need to be increasing our production/capture.

> According to the article

Given the forces aligned against green energy, I don't want to say big oil, but well, big oil, I don't see why we should that that at face value. Sunshine is generally quite available during hot sunny days, so it seems like it should scale for providing energy to power AC units.

Peak AC demand in most areas is well after peak solar power production times. During the summer months AC demand often extends well after sunset.

To an extent we can use solar power generated in the western US to feed some of the later hours of AC demand in the east. But we can't do the reverse. And even the most optimistic estimates state that we are many years from having a useful amount of grid scale storage.

To give an illustrative idea of your point --

I typically leave my AC at 75f during daylight (when it's 100f ambient), but turn it down to 70 to sleep (when it's 85-90f ambient). So it's possible I'm actually ACing more or as much at night.

if it results in more people taking climate change seriously and it leads to investing in alternative forms of energy generation

We're reaching breast cancer levels of awareness here. At this point, we're all aware of the issue and are actively voting to invest money in solving the problem. Awareness is no longer the problem.

I don't see a large chunk of the voter base pretending that breast cancer is a myth invented by the chinese to slow down America.

"large chunk of the voter base"

I'm not sure how large it is...loud, maybe...

Size doesn't matter, only political power. The chunk of the voter base that believes that stuff is also the chunk that currently plays kingmaker for half the american government. Their last president was literally a proponent of this idea.

>> We're reaching breast cancer levels of awareness here. At this point, we're all aware of the issue and are actively voting to invest money in solving the problem. Awareness is no longer the problem.

> I don't see a large chunk of the voter base pretending that breast cancer is a myth invented by the chinese to slow down America.

That's because the breast cancer hasn't led to the same kinds of policy proposals that climate change has. If it did, I'd expect you'd see similar claims of it being a myth, etc.

IMHO, claiming climate change is a myth is just a symptom of democratic opposition to certain climate change policies.

I appreciate AC enough that I bought a window unit and a gas powered generator to ensure that I don't have to do without. Probably not a net positive for the environment, but I do have tentative plans to switch it over to solar plus lithium iron phosphate battery. One nice thing about AC is that the need for it is pretty correlated with sunshine.

It means that prices for diesel generators go through the roof.

People solve problems and no power is a big problem.

I don't know if increased AC installs have changed this, but I heard in the late 90s that heat waves were the single biggest killer among natural disasters (i.e. edging out floods, hurricanes, earthquakes &c.)

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